PITTSBURG, Kan. — It may be Pittsburg’s most sacred and exuberant party of the year, and it is certainly the most colorful.
More than 100 people, many of them international students from universities around the area, crowded together in an open patch of grass near the Pittsburg State University student center on Saturday afternoon to celebrate Holi, a Hindu harvest festival.
In India, Holi means a day and a night of bonfires and revelry as well as a temporary respite from social norms. In Pittsburg, it is three consecutive hours of much the same thing: dancing, music and cheerfully smearing colored powder on other celebrants.
Holi is a sacred festival for the world’s roughly 1 billion Hindus. Most live in India, but Hindus around the world hold celebrations like the one held Saturday in Pittsburg, which attracted Hindu families from the area as well as exuberant college students.
The festival celebrates the harvest as well as several victories for the good guys of Hindu mythology. It is usually held on a full moon near the beginning of March, but the organizers of Holi at PSU pushed it back to increase the chances of warm weather — and water balloons.
NSB Venugopal, 21, the president of the Indian student group that organized the event, viewed it as a chance to share his culture with the campus.
“We don’t want people just to know about our culture,” he said. “We want them to experience it.”
Many of the dozens of international students on hand for the event grew up celebrating Holi in India. They said the event reminded them of home, though the American event is more subdued.
“It’s very simple and neat and clean,” said Reagh Sunk, 21, who drove from the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg for the party.
PSU has held an event for Holi every year for more than a decade. Asha Patel, 41, an office manager from Parsons, Kansas, has brought her family many times. She says earlier versions were more intense, especially when there was a swimming pool to be pushed into, but she doesn’t mind.
“Thank God,” she said. “I got thrown into the pool so many times last year.”
The playful, brilliantly colored festival has been appropriated by non-Hindus in Europe and North America. Springfield, for instance, will hold a 5-kilometer color run later this month, an increasingly common event in which runners are smeared with pigment at intervals along the course. The race bills itself as “the happiest 5K on the planet” on its website, which points to a Disney World activity and Holi as influences.
Some Hindu organizations have capitalized on the broad appeal of Holi. The Salt Lake City-based Krishna Temple puts on “festivals of colors,” billing them as colorful music festivals, and it claims to be the largest American dealer of the festival’s distinctive colored powder.
The PSU students bought 50 pounds of powder from the temple. It came in bags, which the students distributed at intervals throughout the afternoon. According to the label on the bags, the substance is to be used “for festive celebration and expression of joy and fun with colors.”
The Hindu students who organized the celebration of Holi at PSU say the festival bridges cultural divides, both within India and elsewhere.
On Holi, “we take down the barriers and play,” said Praveen Guraja, 28, vice president of the PSU Indian Student Association. He added that during the festival, caste and ethnic divisions in India are temporarily buried beneath caked-on colored powder.
Sherin Lancy, a first-year international student at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, has seen that firsthand. As a Catholic growing up in India, she was thrown into the holiday along with everyone else.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said of her religion. “Everyone gets color on them.”
American students didn’t mind the chance to get a little wild.
“It’s just a lot of fun,” said DeAundre Puritty, 20, a sophomore at PSU.
Shelby Smith, 21, and also a sophomore, agreed.
“It’s just a festival of colors,” she said. “And it’s cheaper than the color run.”
About Hinduism
Hinduism is the world’s third-most populous religion, according to the Pew Forum on Religion. Its adherents, most of whom live in India, account for 15 percent of the global population.